This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/789,715, which was filed on May 28, 2010, which claims priority to U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/346,394, filed May 19, 2010.
Recent years have seen an explosion in the popularity and availability of social media platforms, such as social networking applications, web logs (“blogs”), message boards, interactive news websites, photo-sharing sites, etc. Social media allows users to interact with one another, such as by posting new content and/or by posting reactions to content posted by others. As such, social media platforms provide users with forums in which to engage in conversations with one another.
The wealth of data embodying sentiment and opinion that exists on social media platforms is of great value to companies that wish to understand potential customers, to gauge public sentiment regarding particular brands, to detect social trends, and/or to otherwise understand target customer demographics. Further, wealth of data embodying sentiment and opinion that exists on social media offers the opportunity to influence public sentiment and creates demand for new tools focused on gathering and interpreting this valuable data. A single social media platform may include millions of posts, organized into many different threads and posted by a combination of millions of different users. In many cases, conversations started on one platform may spill over onto another, different users may have different audiences, levels of influence, multiple usernames or multiple accounts, posts may express different sentiments or may be of varying levels of interest, etc. Many types of businesses stand to benefit greatly from tools for gathering and understanding social media data.